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Friday, August 17, 2012

Punctuation 101: Dialogue Tags

by Jill WilliamsonThis may be review for some of you. But I'd like to go over this for those of you who have some confusion about when to use a comma or period or what when writing dialogue.

First of all, there are two types of dialogue
tags: “said” tags and “action” tags.

Said TagsA said tag assigns the dialogue
to a speaker by using the word “said” or a variation of that word (asked,
yelled, whispered, etc). A said tag is connected to the dialogue with a comma,
unless the dialogue is a question or requires an exclamation point. When using
a said tag, the pronoun must be lowercase unless you are using a proper name. Pay
attention to the underlined parts of the examples below for proper punctuation.

Sample said tags:

“I’m
sorry,” the girl said.

“I am
the President of the United States,”
Abraham said.“What do
you want?” she asked.“What do
you want?” Kate asked.

“Leave
me alone!” he screamed.

“Leave
me alone!” Mike
screamed.

“I can’t
believe I’m telling you this,” Mindy
said, “but I’m one of them.” (In
this example, the said tag interrupted the dialogue, so a comma was used on the other side of the said tag since the sentence wasn't over yet. If you do this, make sure
the interruption falls in a natural place for your character to pause. Read the
dialogue out loud to see what sounds best.)

“I can’t believe I’m telling you this,”
Mindy said. “I’m one
of them.” (Here the said tag came between two complete sentences.)
Mindy took a deep breath and said, “I
can’t believe I’m telling you this, but I’m one of them.” (The “Mindy took a
deep breath” part of the example is what's called an action tag. But if you combine action with a
said tag, like I did in this example, you need to punctuate the sentence like you would for a said tag.)Action TagsAn action tag is a complete
sentence that identifies the speaker by what they are doing. Because we see a
character’s action in the same paragraph as dialogue, we know they are the
speaker. Since action tags are sentences, they are punctuated like sentences.Sample action tags:

Krista
rolled her eyes and sighed. “What
do you want, Paul?”“Get out!” Beth slammed the door in her
mother’s face.

“If you
want to come, get in.” Kyle
opened the car door. “Just
don’t be mad at me if you get in trouble for missing curfew.”

“If you want to come, get in,” Kyle opened the car door, “but don’t be mad at me if you get
in trouble for missing curfew.” (This example used an action tag to interrupt the sentence.)

In special cases when an action
interrupts dialogue in a quick way, you can use em dashes to set this off. Since the
break belongs to the sentence, rather than the dialogue inside, the em dashes
must appear outside the quotation marks.

“Before we start”—the knight plunged one of the blades into the grassy soil—“we need to go over the
basics.”

Wow! Thank you so much for this! The punctuation needs concerning said and action tags has always confused me. This explained it really well for me, and was quite easy to understand! Thank you, Mrs. Jill!

Dialogue tags are something that's never troubled me before but I work with numerous young authors who lack in this department, and I am going to be referencing this post a lot. You've explained this so nice and simple. Thanks, Jill!

This is great! I'm im Portugal and our dialogue tags are completly different. This is actually very usefull for when i'm writting in English, for exemple, for the go teen writers contest's. Anyway, thank you so much for this post!

Thanks for the post! I'm not sure if I've ever read a sentence like this one: “If you want to come, get in,” Kyle opened the car door, “but don’t be mad at me if you get in trouble for missing curfew.” Am I, like, phrasing that wrong in my mind so that it sounds like a mistake? It feels like there still needs to be a speech tag or something.